The job of the travel writer today

“It seems to me that the job of the travel writer today is no longer what it was in the nineteenth century, which is sort of marching out like Livingstone and Stanley, and finding Lake Victoria and penetrating the unknown quarters of the globe. It seems to me that the job of the travel writer today is to strip off that very thin veneer of globalization, which still hides a multitude of different attitudes. We think today, because of our technology, because of the internet, because we can type in Google Earth and can look at a street in Siberia or Singapore or Saigon with huge ease, and just walk down the road virtually, that we understand and know the world, and that it’s been mapped and gridded and studied. As 9/11 revealed so dramatically, we don’t understand the world. There are huge areas of the world about which we know virtually nothing. And even our greatest intelligence agencies, with their ability to filter twenty million emails in a second, and do all the gizmo stuff, are left sort of blindly gasping for air in the face of a whole other series of realities which they haven’t even begun to grasp.”

-William Dalrymple, in a recent interview with Open Source‘s Christopher Lydon

Features: Definition in Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary: past tense and past participle of wake Definition in African American Vernacular English (AAVE): “well-informed, up-to-date” First print appearance of the AAVE usage: 1942 In the late ’90s and early aughts, the word woke was a life vest. My parents and the other black people I grew up with […] […]

Hats off, please, to Mat Johnson , author of this wonderful, black-humored novel - part social satire, part meditation on race in America, part metafiction and, just as important, a rollicking fantasy adventure. " Pym " is outrageously entertaining, a book that brilliantly re-imagines and extends...